The time of the Easter festival became, after the
second century, the subject of long and violent controversies and
practical confusions, which remind us of the later Eucharistic
disputes, and give evidence that human passion and folly have sought to
pervert the great facts and institutions of the New Testament from holy
bonds of unity into torches of discord, and to turn the sweetest honey
into poison, but, with all their efforts, have not been able to destroy
the beneficent power of those gifts of God.

These Paschal controversies descended into the
present period, and ended with the victory of the Roman and Alexandrian
practice of keeping Easter, not, like Christmas and the Jewish
Passover, on a fixed day of the month, whatever day of the week it
might be, but on a Sunday, as the day of the resurrection of our Lord.
Easter thus became, with all the feasts depending on it, a movable
feast; and then the different reckonings of the calendar led to many
inconveniences and confusions. The exact determination of Easter Sunday
is made from the first full moon after the vernal equinox; so that the
day may fall on any Sunday between the 22d day of March and the 25th of
April.

The council of Arles in 314 had already decreed,
in its first canon, that the Christian Passover be celebrated “uno die
et uno tempore per omnem orbem,” and that the bishops of Rome should
fix the time. But as this order was not universally obeyed, the fathers
of Nicaea proposed to settle the matter, and this was the second main
object of the first ecumenical council in 325. The result of the
transactions on this point, the particulars of which are not known to
us, does not appear in the canons (probably out of consideration for
the numerous Quartodecimanians), but is doubtless preserved in the two
circular letters of the council itself and the emperor Constantine.750750 Socrates: Hist. Eccl. i. 9; Theodoret: H. E. i.
10; Eusebius: Vita Const ii. 17. Comp. Hefele, l.c. i. p. 309
sqq.
The feast of the resurrection was thenceforth required to be celebrated
everywhere on a Sunday, and never on the day of the Jewish passover,
but always after the fourteenth of Nisan, on the Sunday after the first
vernal full moon. The leading motive for this regulation was opposition
to Judaism, which had dishonored the passover by the crucifixion of the
Lord.” We would,” says the circular letter of Constantine in reference to the council of Nice, “we
would have nothing in common with that most hostile people, the Jews;
for we have received from the Redeemer another way of honoring God [the
order of the days of the week], and harmoniously adopting this method,
we would withdraw ourselves from the evil fellowship of the Jews. For
what they pompously assert, is really utterly absurd: that we cannot
keep this feast at all without their instruction .... It is our duty to
have nothing in common with the murderers of our Lord.” This bitter
tone against Judaism runs through the whole letter.

At Nicaea, therefore, the Roman and Alexandrian
usage with respect to Easter triumphed, and the Judaizing practice of
the Quartodecimanians, who always celebrated Easter on the fourteenth
of Nisan, became thenceforth a heresy. Yet that practice continued in
many parts of the East, and in the time of Epiphanius, about a.d. 400,
there were many, Quartodecimanians, who, as he says, were orthodox,
indeed, in doctrine, but in ritual were addicted to Jewish fables, and
built upon the principle: “Cursed is every one who does not keep his
passover on the fourteenth of Nisan.”751751 Epiphanius, Haer. l.c. 1. Comp. Ex. xii.
15. They kept the day with the Communion and with
fasting till three o’clock. Yet they were divided into
several parties among themselves. A peculiar offshoot of the
Quartodecimanians was the rigidly ascetic Audians, who likewise held
that the passover must be kept at the very same time (not after the
same manner) with the Jews, on the fourteenth of Nisan, and for their
authority appealed to their edition of the Apostolic Constitutions.

And even in the orthodox church these measures did
not secure entire uniformity. For the council of Nicaea, probably from
prudence, passed by the question of the Roman and Alexandrian
computation of Easter. At least the Acts contain no reference to it.752752 Hefele thinks, however (i. p. 313 f.), from an
expression of Cyril of Alexandria and Leo I., that the Nicaenum (1)
gave the Alexandrian reckoning the preference over the Roman; (2)
committed to Alexandria the reckoning, to Rome the announcing, of the
Easter term; but that this order was not duly
observed. At all events this difference
remained: that Rome, afterward as before, fixed the vernal equinox, the
terminus a quo of the Easter full moon, on the 18th of March, while
Alexandria placed it correctly on the 21st. It thus occurred, that the
Latins, the very year after the Nicene council, and again in the years
330, 333, 340, 341, 343, varied from the Alexandrians in the time of
keeping Easter. On this account the council of Sardica, as we learn
from the recently discovered Paschal Epistles of Athanasius, took the
Easter question again in hand, and brought about, by mutual
concessions, a compromise for the ensuing fifty years, but without
permanent result. In 387 the difference of the Egyptian and the Roman
Easter amounted to fully five weeks. Later attempts also to adjust the
matter were in vain, until the monk Dionysius Exiguus, the author of
our Christian calendar, succeeded in harmonizing the computation of
Easter on the basis of the true Alexandrian reckoning; except that the
Gallican and British Christians adhered still longer to the old custom,
and thus fell into conflict with the Anglo-Saxon. The introduction of
the improved Gregorian calendar in the Western church in 1582 again
produced discrepancy; the Eastern and Russian church adhered to the
Julian calendar, and is consequently now
about twelve days behind us. According to the Gregorian calendar, which
does not divide the months with astronomical exactness, it sometimes
happens that the Paschal full moon is put a couple of hours too early,
and the Christian Easter, as was the case in 1825, coincides with the
Jewish Passover, against the express order of the council of
Nicaea.

752 Hefele thinks, however (i. p. 313 f.), from an
expression of Cyril of Alexandria and Leo I., that the Nicaenum (1)
gave the Alexandrian reckoning the preference over the Roman; (2)
committed to Alexandria the reckoning, to Rome the announcing, of the
Easter term; but that this order was not duly
observed.